Scholz, author of the fascinating fictional exposé of the defense industry Radiance, demonstrates an equally nimble imagination in delineating the lives of woeful scientists, artists and madmen in this cerebral collection of 12 stories. The first piece, now almost unbearably poignant, is "The Eve of the Last Apollo," in which the first man to walk on the moon, John Andrews, finds his world gradually disintegrating by 1975 as NASA ceases being interested in lunar exploration and Andrews's scornful wife deserts him for a back-to-nature lover. A middle-aged narrator disenchanted by academic and scientific failures and blunted emotionally reappears in several other stories, such as the darkly ambiguous "Menagerie of Babel," where the jaded narrator living in a communal Berkeley, Calif., house recognizes in the person of the idiot-savant painter Murphy his rarefied theories of genetics and Darwinian competition. Occasionally, these narrators veer toward the solipsistic, such as the science writer of "Invisible Ink," who mouths "the bogus pomp of the pseudoseer." Most successful are the tales that achieve a marvelous synthesis of historical and present-day currents, such as the title story, in which the disparate lives of three insurance salesmen (one of them Franz Kafka) collide in a resoundingly modernistic fashion at the a 1920s Conference of International Insurance Executives in Prague. The affecting "Altamira" finds art historian Bernard Vogel traveling back in time to occupy the body of a master in Jan Van Eyck's 15th-century studio. Most of the stories were published in sci-fi magazines, and a few of them, such as the defiantly unchronological "A Draft of Canto CI," peter out into phenomenological obscurantism. Overall, however, these are superbly crafted pieces, and Scholz proves once again he is a writer of alluring intellectual depth and subtlety. 4-city author tour. (Feb.)
